Libraries Defend Open Access 116
aisaac writes "Earlier this year an article in Nature (PDF, subscription required) exposed publishers' plans to equate public access to federally funded research with government censorship and the destruction of peer review. In an open letter last month, Rockefeller University Press castigated the publishers' sock-puppet outfit, PRISM, for using distorting rhetoric in a coordinated PR attack on open access. Now the Association of Research Libraries has released an Issue Brief addressing this PR campaign in more detail. The Issue Brief exposes some of the distortions used to persuade key policy makers that recent gains made by open access scientific publishing pose a danger to peer reviewed scientific research, free markets, and possibly the future of western civilization. As an example of what the publishers backing PRISM hate, consider the wonderfully successful grants policy of the National Institutes of Health, which requires papers based on grant-funded research to be published in PubMed Central."
Overdrive. Our libraries come up short. (Score:2, Informative)
* Send this page to somebody
"I therefore urge the Boston Public Library to terminate its association with OverDrive Audio Books, and adopt a policy of refusing to be agents for the propagation of Digital Restrictions Management."
http://www.fsf.org/news/letter-to-the-bpl [fsf.org]
Richard Stallman sent a letter to the Boston Public Library (BPL) asking them to abandon the system they currently use to distribute audio books, since this format requires the use of proprietary software. It is illegal in the US to release free software capable of reading these audio books because of the Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) measures that are being imposed.
You can help by sending your own letter to the BPL (gref at bpl dot org) and by examining the policies of your own local library. We would be glad to see CCs of any letters you send at campaigns@fsf.org [mailto] and to hear about any similar policies in place at libraries other than the BPL.
Please keep an eye on our DRM campaign area for future updates about this and other related issues
http://www.fsf.org/news/letter-to-the-bpl [fsf.org]
Re:say what? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:say what? (Score:5, Informative)
- Research money (typically from the government, ie your money) is used to fund research and scientists write articles about it.
- Those articles are sent to periodicals (journals) to be published. The journals are corporate, and carry different amounts of prestige. For a researcher, getting papers in prestigious journals is extremely important, so they send them off willingly, and the journals do not pay a dime (in fact, sometimes the researcher has to pay).
- The article gets to sent to an editor at the journal, who is typically a well established senior researcher working for free because being an editor is prestigious (that is, he is working on time paid for by your money).
- The editor chooses researchers to do "peer review" on the article, that is anonymously write judge its merit. These peer reviewers work for free.
- If the article is accepted, the researcher is very happy, and gleefully signs over the copyright on the article he has written (which you paid for) to the corporate publisher.
- The corporate publisher, which now owns the article, won't let anybody access it unless they pay for a subscription to the journal. Large universities typically pay millions of dollars a year (again, largely your money) for journal subscriptions.
So to recap: researchers write the article for free (or pay), editors work for free, reviewers work for free, the publishers get the copyright and loads of money. In some fields you are even expected to typeset the article yourself, leaving the publisher only with the arduous task of visiting the bank to check on its ever increasing balance, and laughing at the sucker who finances all this (you). Because there is prestige in publishing in the "right" journal, and the money being spent doesn't belong to the people spending it, there is no market pressure to drive the prices down nor to make the system more sane. A number of companies, notably Elsevier, Wiley, and Springer, make incredible amounts of money off this.
Lately, however, something has finally started happening. The open access movement has been started to try to make scientific work freely available on the Internet, through open journals (like PLoS [plos.org]) and through researchers retaining copyright so they can put their articles on their own homepages and on sites like arXiv [arxiv.org] and aforementioned PubMed Central. This movement has gained a lot of momentum, and what is just starting to happen is that the people holding the pursestrap (like the National Institue of Health) want to start requiring that research they pay for published open access. Obviously, the publishers will do anything not to lose their sweet gig, hence the lobbyists all over capitol hill screaming censorship and government interference (both of which are completely ridiculous - I'm as libertarian as the next guy, but if the government pays for the science, it can say where you publish it).
Re:say what? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:say what? (Score:5, Informative)
New milennium capitalism uses political means to artificially support a business model and short-circuit free market competition. If you can't win by competing, pay off the political process to rig the rules in your favor.
What is basically happening is that the publishers want to protect their little piles of paper via legislative means. If they actually had something worthwhile, people would pony up for access. In the old days libraries would pay for hard copies because there really was no other way to do it and the prices were fairly reasonable. Individuals might personally subscribe to a relevant journal. Now that there is no reason to actually print hard copies the publishers are fighting tooth and nail to stay in business.
If the government wanted to do something useful, they could set up a framework in which legitimate peer reviewed journals could be published online free of charge.
If we are going to have an information superhighway it shouldn't be a toll road.
the scholary communications process is broken (Score:5, Informative)
Again, the process is broken, and there are three contributing factors, listed here in no priority order. First, librarians (and libraries) desire to preserve the historical record for future use. This means they (we) desire to collect and organize just about as much of human's intellectual output in order to foster the growth of knowledge. Idealistic, I know, but it is true. Second, scholars (usually university faculty) have the natural desire for promotion and tenure. They want to be recognized by their peers and rewarded for achievements. This is often realized through publishing journal articles in sets of established venues. Third, publishers have the natural desire to earn as much money as possible. This is the nature of capitalism.
This three-fold combination (buy everything for the sake of future generations, published in established venues, and make as much money as possible) has driven the prices of scholarly journals through the roof. For example, just guess how much the average scholarly journal costs per year? If you guessed less than a few thousand dollars, then you were wrong. Twelve issues. Glossy paper. No ads. $3,000/year or more. Just about the worse journal is Brain Research costing close to $15,000/year.
Each of the three groups (librarians, scholars/researchers, and publishers) have the "rights" to do what they are doing, but in the process I sincerely believe the public gets the short end of the stick. Because the journals are licensed (not purchased) from the publishers, a person needs to be a part of the licensee's membership group in order to read the articles. This excluded the general public, researchers from abroad, or people in third-world countries. How are these people suppose to benefit from the research if they can't have access to the content?
Open access publishing is seen as one possible solution to these problems. It is very much akin to open source software. Research something. (Scratch an itch.) Write about it. (Document your software.) Deposit it in an archive and give it away (Make it available for download). Wait for comments. (Support your software.) Repeat, and enjoy the acknowledgement of your peers.
Open access publishing is not the answer to everything just as open source software is not the answer to everything. On the other hand, the public -- who has funded much of the research of scholars through tax-paid grants -- does have the right to access to materials they helped create. PRISM advocates the commercial sector continue to have control over the distribution process. Such a perspective is a disservice to the nature of scholarship and the freedom of access to fundamental knowledge.
--
Eric Lease Morgan
University Libraries of Notre Dame
Re:say what? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:say what? Missing the point (Score:1, Informative)
bozos who want me to pay over $60,000 for back issues of say, rev sci inst, and I am not
making this up. Does AIP really promote physics by doing this, or just enrich themselves. They
fund zero research last I checked.
And last I checked, the governments fund nearly all pure research, and even that is getting
mostly reduced to more short term goals these days.
Point is, I, you, and anybody else who pays taxes already paid for this stuff once. Why should the
AIP get rich off everyone who just wants to see what they've paid for already? If it was the (pessimistically)
$0.20/article it really costs them to archive and have a web server, and the abstracts were good enough
to see if I was going to waste my 20 cents, fine. But now it's over twenty dollars and the abstracts tend
to obfuscate the true content or make it look like there's more there than there turns out to be. Google
some science stuff that links to an abstract and try the buy now link if you don't believe me.
This is very relevant to me as I'm doing self-funded research and no nearby library has paid up for
this kind of content so I can get to it. I'm well off, but see the price above. Could you get that one past your
wife for a hobby? Oh I forgot, this is slashdot.